There is a flight-search interface I have used, on and off, for most of a decade, and every one of them has been designed with the same quiet assumption at the bottom of it. The assumption is that you are here because you want to spend miles. The interface will help you spend them. It will show you the sweetest redemptions on the routes it happens to know about, and it will suggest the cards whose bonuses would top up your balance if you're a little short. When it can, it will send you to a booking page where the cash price is quoted in points and the words next to the button are the same words the credit-card marketing team wrote for the review that convinced you to apply for the card in the first place. This is not because those products are dishonest. It is because their revenue model requires you to eventually pull the trigger, and the language is engineered — carefully, well — to make pulling the trigger feel like the smart move.
The problem with this is that the smart move, quite often, is the opposite one. The smart move is to look at the cash price, look at what redeeming would actually cost you in points, look at what those points are worth on a different trip, and then pay the cash. This is the version of the calculation that never gets surfaced in the interface, because if you take it seriously you will not spend your miles today. You will spend them the next time the math tips the other way. The next time may be six months from now. In the meantime the interface has nothing to sell you.
I built a flight search that tells you, in a small chip on every card, which of those two calls to make. Not always — sometimes we do not have the data to decide, and in those cases the chip stays silent. But when we do have the data, the chip tells you plainly. Great cash deal, when the cash fare is well below what a typical award would cost in the program you selected. Points win big, when the cash fare is well above it. Fair value, when it is a wash. That's it. Three states. No affiliate link on the chip itself. No calls to action to burn the balance. Just the calculation you would have done yourself if you had the time and the numbers in front of you at the same moment.
The reason nobody else does this, I think, is not that the math is hard. The math is a division. The reason is that a points-writer's paycheck is downstream of you spending points — either directly, through the credit-card affiliate that pays them when you apply for the card that transfers to the airline, or indirectly, through the sponsored content that dries up if their audience stops caring enough to click. Telling a reader "you are looking at this fare wrong; the smart move is to hold your miles and pay cash" is genuine advice and also a small act of self-sabotage for the business model that produced the article. Most writers, faced with that trade-off honestly, will find a version of the story that still ends in the reader doing something. The something is what pays the mortgage.
The advice a points writer cannot give you is the advice that would cost them their next sponsored post. This is that advice.
Our mortgage — this is not a thing you say in a launch post but I am going to say it anyway — is downstream of the click on the flight, not on the card. If we point you at cash and you pay cash on the partner we hand you off to, we get paid. If we point you at points and you go book on the airline's own site with your miles, we do not get paid. This is not a virtuous choice. It is the shape of the arrangement. What it does mean is that the incentive that would push us to say "redeem your miles" when we should be saying "save your miles" is not there. That absence is, functionally, our whole editorial position. I would love to claim it as courage. It is, honestly, incentive design.
The other thing the chip does — and this is the part I like more — is get out of the way when it should. Not every fare has a good verdict. On short-haul US routes on programs with thin award-chart data, we cannot compute a meaningful comparison, and rather than fake one we render nothing. On approximate-date fares — the yellow-tinted cards that show up when TP's cache has slid off your exact travel window — the chip suppresses itself entirely, because giving you a points verdict on a fare you are not actually going to book would be worse than useless. Better silent than wrong. This is the same rule the CHEAPEST badge follows, the same rule the Greenest badge follows, and honestly the same rule I try to apply to everything on the results page. If we do not know, we should not pretend.
The place where this all lands, when it lands right, is a small piece of behavior that I have watched change in a handful of my own searches this month. I opened a fare on a route I fly a lot, saw the cash price, glanced at the chip, saw "Great cash deal — save your miles," and closed the tab. I did not book. I did not redeem. I went back to it three weeks later, when the fare had risen and the chip had flipped, and I burned the miles. The interface did the one job an honest interface can do — it deferred a decision I would have otherwise made under the wrong pressure. My balance is roughly where it was. The trip is better than the one I would have taken in July.
The advice a points writer cannot give you is the advice that would cost them their next sponsored post. The advice a flight search cannot give you is the advice that would cost it the click. I am aware, writing this, that the model I've described puts a small subset of readers in the position of using our tool to decide not to click through, and then closing the tab, and going about their day. I am fine with that. The rest of the decade is long. The trip you take because the math finally worked is not the same trip as the trip you took because you were tired of holding the balance. Both are legitimate. Only one of them is a trip you will remember for the right reasons.
None of this is an argument against loyalty programs. Miles remain, on the right redemption, the best travel deal a normal person can access. The ANA business seat to Tokyo is still the sweetest redemption I know. What it is an argument against is a flight search that treats the balance in your account as an obligation to spend down. It is your balance. The right decision, on the right week, is often to spend cash. That is the version of the interface we shipped. If we did our job, you will use it less often than you used the old one. That is the point.